Oxo Good Grips Pour-Over Coffee Maker review – CNET

The Good Thanks to its clever design, manually brewing coffee with the Oxo Good Grips Pour-Over is extremely easy. The coffee maker consistently brews delicious cups of properly extracted java with plenty of complex flavor. Since it has few parts, all of which are dishwasher safe, cleaning the Oxo Pour-Over is a cinch.

The Bad The Oxo Good Grips Pour-Over is more expensive than basic single cup pour-over coffee funnels. The coffee brewer is made from plastic instead of premium materials such as glass, metal, or wood.

The Bottom Line Drip, pour over, indeed any coffee fan should jump on the Oxo Good Grips Pour-Over Coffee Maker’s combination of low cost and excellent brew quality, but large volume java drinkers are best served by large automatic appliances from Bonavita and Technivorm.

Java purists will tell you all that’s required to make outstanding coffee are fresh grounds, hot water, and a reliable filter. That’s it, everything else is extra complication. In fact many of this subset swear by the most manual of brewing methods — pour-over. Performing pour-over properly, however, takes some skill and practice. Here to help is the $16 Oxo Good Grips Pour-Over Coffee Maker, a deceptively simple yet very capable kitchen gadget.

Thanks to a clever design, the Oxo elegantly removes many stumbling blocks from the pour-over process. Yet despite the loss of a few variables, brewing coffee with the Good Grips Pour-Over remains a very hands-on experience, and one which consistently delivers excellent results.

Design and brewing

Brewing pour-over coffee is pretty self-explanatory process — you’ll just pour hot water over fresh coffee grounds, then wait for it to drip through a filter into a cup waiting below. As such, classic pour-over coffee brewers are pretty basic, typically consisting of just a single funnel-shaped filter holder. For this reason, they don’t tend to cost very much.

For instance, a plastic Melitta cone runs for just $3 while porcelain versions cost $20. Even luxury Chemex brewers, which are crafted from premium materials such as glass and wood, start at $39. That’s certainly a far cry from the multiple hundreds you’ll have to sell out for a quality automatic drip machine from Bonavita, Technivorm, and Ratio.

The Oxo Good Grips Pour-Over looks simple but brews complex-tasting coffee.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

You’ll pay a premium for the Oxo Good Grips Pour-Over compared to its cheapest plastic competitors, but the unique design offsets the higher price tag. That’s because Oxo helps account for one of the trickiest challenges to brewing pour over correctly: decanting the right volume of water into your brewing filter.

Other crucial factors include hitting the correct brewing time, water temperature, not to mention the even saturation of your coffee grounds. If any of these variables skews out of control, you can kiss your chances of enjoying a tasty cup of joe goodbye.

The Oxo’s ace in the hole is its handy water tank.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

The Good Grips Pour-Over has one physical enhancement which effectively neutralizes these issues, transforming it into the best coffee gadget of its kind I’ve used personally. That ace in the hole is a small water reservoir which sits above its filter. Made of clear plastic and sporting graduated labels for easy measurement, the tank is durable enough to accept water just off the boil.

Once you fill it to the precise volume (6 to 10 ounces, 180 to 360 mL), water slowly drips through eight tiny holes on the bottom of the tank to wet the brewer’s bed of coffee grounds. Acting more like a shower head inside electric drip brewers, the rate of hot water flow is fixed by the physical size of these apertures along with the single opening at the foot of the filter funnel.

Pour hot water right of the boil directly into the reservoir.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Likewise, since Oxo recommends always brewing with water straight from a boiling kettle you don’t have to fuss with thermometers or trying to hit an ideal brew temperature. Still, to ensure consistent quality I strongly suggest grinding beans the moment before brewing, weighing the coffee you intend to use, and processing them through a burr grinder to achieve a uniform grind size.

Nikon D3400 review – CNET

The D3400’s body looks almost unchanged since the D3100, which was three generations ago.

Nikon

The Nikon D3300 has long been my go-to recommendation for a cheap dSLR, but after 2 years it’s usually time to slap a new coat of paint on consumer products. Nikon’s 2016 update to that camera, the D3400, has some small enhancements to bring it up to date, but nothing vital.

Along with the camera, Nikon has announced new kit lenses to accompany it. The 18-55mm versions of its new AF-P lenses — they incorporate stepper motors like Canon’s STM lenses for smoother and quieter focus in LCD-based Live View — were announced in January and have been available in Europe and Australia, but they’re finally making their US debut. Additionally, the company revealed another pair of 70-300mm AF-P lenses.

There are two versions of each of the two zooms, one with optical image stabilization (Nikon’s Vibration Reduction, or VR) and one without; the names differ solely by the “VR” designation and $50 (a more significant £60 in the UK and as-yet unknown price in Australia). This is going to get really confusing for shoppers, who will, I bet, inadvertently end up buying the wrong kit.

The AF-P DX Nikkor 18-55mm f3.5-5.6G VR is $250 (£230, AU$200) while the non-VR version is $200 (£170; I don’t see this version of the lens in Australia), and the AF-P DX Nikkor 70-300mm f4.5- 6.3G ED VR costs $400 (directly converted £307, AU$520), $350 (approximately £270, AU$455) for the nonstabilized one.

Nikon’s initially offering two kits of the D3400, one with the 18-55mm VR lens for $650. The other option is a dual-lens kit with the VR version of the 18-55mm lens but the non-VR version of the 70-300mm. While that’s a silly configuration — stabilization on the lens where you don’t need it and no stabilization on the one where you do — it allows Nikon to hit its just-under-$1,000 price of…$999.95. I don’t have overseas information yet, but those convert to approximately £500, AU$845 for the first kit and £770, AU$1,300 for the dual-lens kit.

What’s new

• Sensor update. Though it’s the same resolution as the D3300, the new sensor follows Nikon’s trend of removing the low-pass filter (also known as the antialiasing filter) to deliver sharper photos. In fact, along with the update to the company’s Expeed 4 imaging engine, it looks an awful lot like the imaging system that’s in the D5300. It gives the camera a better noise profile, extended into what were the expanded regions on the D3300.
• Wireless support. No Wi-Fi here; Nikon’s betting on Bluetooth to maintain a persistent low-power connection between the camera and your mobile device. That’s fine given how lame the company’s SnapBridge app is. Hopefully there’ll be an iPhone/iPad
  -compatible app by the time the camera ships, because there still isn’t at the moment.
• Improved battery life. The D3400’s extends to 1,200 shots from 700, despite using the same battery.

My take

Like Canon, Nikon is now in a position where its older, better cameras (in Nikon’s case the D5300 from 2013) are cheaper than their cheap dSLRs — which, by the way, also have old technology, but a 2016 date on them. The D5300 has better autofocus and metering systems, an articulated LCD and Wi-Fi. The Canon EOS Rebel T6/EOS 1300D is cheaper, but the D3400 has better hardware, so its real Canon competition is the old EOS Rebel T5i/700D, which, like the D5300, has better specs for the same price. Still, unless Nikon broke something, it should carry on the D3300’s torch as a solid first dSLR.

Comparative specifications